Beyond the window, beyond the sharp click-clack of pool balls, beyond the drone of video games, Donald's mom, Sandy, transfers the family's wet laundry from the washer to the dryer.

"I've never seen a Laundromat with pool tables before," says the Dania woman, pleased that wash day has become family day.

"It's different," agrees her husband. "I work nights, so usually I'd be sleeping right now. But the boys [Donald and 12-year-old Cecil Jr.) wanted to learn pool, so I got up and came with her."

Frances Burns, former Canadian social worker and owner (along with her husband, Alan, and friend Adrian Murphy) of Super Wash, has just walked in the front door. She spots the boys and heads back to the gameroom. "No kids allowed in here during school hours," she says with an authority that expands her 4-foot-11-inch stature. "Oh," she says, noting for the first time the parent. "You're their dad? That's fine then."

"I've been told," says Burns, "it's the biggest Laundromat in the state."

Maybe.

Certainly, the neon-trimmed facility on Federal Highway in Dania is plump with diversions. Enough, some customers would have you believe, to elevate the sorry chore of washing.

"I enjoy coming here," declares Zina Boyd of Fort Lauderdale. "I do. Especially when I have to bring the kids."One of them, at this very moment, is sipping juice and pumping quarters into a video game. "The gameroom keeps them out of trouble and I can watch what they're doing," Boyd says. "Also, there are plenty of snacks and soda machines."

Nearby an elderly man sits at a table working a crossword puzzle. One customer watches a cable movie, while another tunes in CNN.

Some customers, says Burns, create an instant office, spreading out their paperwork on a table and using the nearby pay phone.

Clean, spacious, friendly, Super Wash is a place where an overheard lament about a stubborn stain brings a clerk with a squirt of stain remover. Karyann Love of Hollywood - nose pierced, tattoos encircling her arms and climbing her legs - is a regular. "I like that they made it nonsmoking," she says.

The smoke ban was a customer request.

"We wanted to make it pleasant and comfortable, and give the customers something to do while they're here," says Burns, who thoroughly enjoys the business, which opened last September.

"The people are wonderful," she says. "They come, they get settled in here, and they don't want to leave."

A lanky fellow in shorts and T-shirt pauses to chat. He's Irish. Black Irish, Burns will later say. "Black eyes, black hair, just like my father."The Spanish influence, she says.

"I'm from the capital of Ireland," Burns tells the man.

"Ah, Liverpool," he responds, not missing a beat.

They laugh. She was born and raised in England, but moved to Canada as an adult.

Burns equates the laundry's crowd to an evolving community. "The people remind me of the village I live in back in Canada," she says. "They're just nice, friendly, sensible people."

That village is Rockwood, west of Toronto in southern Ontario, where she and her husband still own a horse and sheep farm.

"After 15 years of retirement, I needed something to do," she says, explaining how she happened to become a South Florida businesswoman. Why a coin laundry? "Think about it," Burns says. "This is a people business and I'm an ex-social worker."

And where, after all, if not a laundry, can you expect people to come clean?